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Adding up '99 (Excerpt)
LA Weekly - December 31, 1999 - January 6, 2000
By Robert Lloyd
IN THE TECHNO-EVOLUTIONARY HISTORICAL PARADE, WE are the people who look at screens: Homo potato. The old Flash
Gordon dream of sending pictures through space, a practical reality for more than half a century now -- one-20th of
a millennium -- has brought us to this pass. This is the legacy of television and the gift of the 20th century to
the 21st: the man-monitor paradigm. (I'm soaking up cathode rays as I write, and at a proximity my mother used to
tell me, back when it was a question of Huckleberry Hound and not personal computing, would "ruin my
eyes." But who speaks for the eyes of the professional screenwatcher? The data processor? The proofreader? The
tortured scribe?) In this closed system, one's gaze is directed not toward the world of real people, solid things
and physical sensation but toward an ephemeral electric simulacrum in which community is defined as looking at the
same pictures. To be sure, there will come a time when such screencentricity will seem as primitive and mysterious
as painting the walls of caves, but this will not happen until science invents a better way of selling you things...
Best of breed in the broadcast-network class is Freaks and Geeks (NBC), Paul Feig and Judd Apatow's funny,
affectionate and now and again heartbreaking portrayal of life on the fringes of high school society in 1980
Michigan, which takes the almost un-American position that people actually are limited by their limitations. I have
a major soft spot -- nearly a sinkhole! -- for its more-or-less star Linda Cardellini, one of the season's several
deep, troubled and less-than-perky young women, along with Heather Matarazzo (Now and Again), Julia Whelan (Once and
Again), Anne Hathaway (Get Real) and Shiri Appleby (Roswell) -- all decent series, by the way, and worth a look.
Runner-up The West Wing (NBC), Aaron Sorkin's workaday fantasy of life inside the White House, is the first soap for
wonks and is appropriately habit-forming; it gets a special citation for making stars out of character actors: All
hail Richard Schiff, Allison Janney, John Spencer. Judging Amy (CBS) can be a little sappy/soppy, but Amy
Brenneman, Tyne Daly, Dan Futterman and Richard T. Jones are excellent company, and there have been welcome guest
shots from Homicide's Reed Diamond and Law & Order's Richard Brooks. Brooks has also been co-starring in GvsE
(USA), an engaging bit of supernatural nonsense that mixes Brimstone and Buddy Faro and serves up such choice lines
of dialogue as "I don't want to see the WWF get corrupted by the minions of Satan." (I thought it already
was.) Buffy spinoff Angel (WB) blows hot and cold from week to week, according to whether the scripts lean to or
away from humor, but I'm there for it.
Copyright © 1999 LA Weekly. All rights reserved.
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